Saturday...Three?

A Moment in Time

Stepping outside, the air was cool, crisp and refreshing. As I took in a deep breath, I caught a slight whiff of the salty seaweed, mixed in with the tang of a cold breeze. My mug of tea was hot in my palms, contrasting sharply with the cold air now surrounding my fingers and wrists. The quietness of the early morning filled my ears. I could hear the calling of some seagulls and in the distance, the gentle crash of the waves up against the craggy rocks. I felt my mind settle and my thoughts quieting as I took it all in.

One-liner

It’s all the little moments that add up to become the bigger moments.

Pondering Conversations

I was chatting with a fellow student this week who was wondering why it is that we often look at a to-do, or assignment, or project and blow it up into this big thing and stress about it. But then when we actually get to it and do it, it is generally not that bad, or takes a shorter amount of time to finish than we thought. Or even if it is hard, we surprise ourselves by pushing through and being able to figure it out. I of course turned it into this much bigger, societal, education-based thing, but my two cents is that in our education system and in our society, we get praised for all the end points. We get praise for good grades, for finishing a school year, for graduating high school, for choosing a college, for graduating college, for getting a fancy job or an internship, etc. If we’re not heading towards those tangible achievements, all the attention, the questions and the advice we’re given is towards those achievements. There’s very little praise or attention given to the mundane and sometimes drudgery of life. What do we need to do to finish school? What steps, what hard things, what complicated situations do we take and go through to get to that job? When I worked as a career counselor, I often met with freshman who had no idea what to major in. They felt so utterly lost, and so bad that they did not know. And I knew that they saw me, a professional, and assumed that I had always known what I wanted to do and had this clear, linear trajectory throughout my life. Which truly is so far from the truth its laughable. So I loved it when I had the opportunity and when the timing was right, to share that I felt exactly the same way when I was 18. Honestly, I felt like I had not even the slightest sense of direction until I was 28, but that is a whole other story. There is so much we assume about people when we see where they are at. I think if we took the time to lay our assumptions aside and ask people about their journey, ask them about the hard things, ask them about their current fears and feelings of inadequacies, we would learn so much more about life. We would realize that it is okay to feel lost, and normal to wonder what the point of life is, and to make turns and stops that seem “untraditional”. One of my favorite phrases when I was in my master’s program was “Life is a journey” and that still rings true today. Although I feel like today it is more like “Life is a wild ride”, but again, I digress. In both of those phrases, its still true that life is not linear.